Simple Distraction
by Serah Villiers
Summary: Because anything is better than thinking about what is to come, the group camp out the night before the biggest day of their lives and talk themselves to distraction. Short vignette, implied SnowxSerah, spoilers.


"So, tell us about this wedding."

Snow's eyes snapped up at the request, instantly honing in on Fang's very distinctive accent. She was sat opposite him on the other side of the fire that was cackling softly and currently cooking a few fish that Lightning and Hope had caught for dinner. Her eyes were unreadable in the orange glow, but now that she had brought the group's attention to him he needed to say something.

"Uh, not really too much to tell. I only proposed a few days ago…" God, was it really only a few days? It felt like a lifetime ago he'd presented Serah with that necklace and taken her to see the fireworks.

"Yeah but you must have been planning it, right? Serah's pretty and smart…you must have been thinking about it for a while! It wasn't just a spur of the moment thing, right?" Vanille asked, tipping her head to the side to watch him better. The fire lit up her flame red hair beautifully and her eyes danced with reflections from the flames. It seemed she was a romantic at heart and almost as excited about the prospect of a wedding as he was.

However Lightning was watching him from her spot next to Vanille, as if daring him to admit that yes it really had been spur of the moment. And though the thought had entered his mind once or twice before, he'd been planning the day a few years from now. But when Serah had been made a L'Cie everything had changed and time had been a luxury they no longer had.

"Well, y-yeah! I had the necklace on me and everything! Come on, this isn't fair…three girls ganging up on me for wedding gossip…help me out guys!" Snow appealed to his fellow males. Sazh gave a fake cough and rubbed the back of his neck as he politely avoided meeting Snow's eyes. Hope just smiled a little and shrugged, indicating he at least wanted to hear the story just as much as the girls did.

And throughout it all Lightning sat still, the fire between them probably the only thing stopping her swinging for him.

"Okay look, yes I wanted to marry her. I'd planned the day a long time in our future, after she'd finished university."

Lightning relaxed a little at that point, nodding once as a seal of approval. Snow sighed inwardly and continued. "Serah wanted to go to university. She was brilliant, she had all the top ones after her. She wanted to do history, she always had a head for dates. Everything seemed to fascinate her, especially the War of Transgressions. She could even see some good in that, trying to justify why people did what they did. The way she tells it you can feel for the people fighting. When she tells it, they're more than just people fighting; they're people with stories. People with families and land to protect. I couldn't let a wedding get in the way of that, she was destined to be brilliant. I wanted to let her finish her studies before we got married and settled down. I wanted to have enough money behind me to provide her with a nice home and all the nice things she deserved…but then she…got turned into a L'Cie. And suddenly I was losing her. I couldn't bare it, I wanted her to know how much I loved her. If these were her final days I wanted her to know exactly what she meant to me. So I proposed."

Snow raised his gaze from the floor, to find everyone staring intently at him. Not one person blinked, even Lightning seemed captivated by the tale. "Sorry it's not quite as romantic as you were hoping, Fang." Snow braved a slight smile, feeling no happiness at all.

"I don't know…seems very romantic to me. You were willing to be with her to the end, no matter how things played out. That's romance worthy of a novel." Fang decided, nodding to herself.

"It's very noble. You put her first, it's what a man should do." Sazh chimed in, staring into the flames, trying not to drag up his own memories of his own wedding.

"I think it's beautiful!" Vanille added, eyes shining brightly and hands clasped together. "I want to be a bridesmaid! Serah will look lovely in a white dress, I want to help with her hair and make-up! Oh, Fang, you know that silver hair pin your mother used to have? Maybe it's still in that drawer in the house by the school in Oerba? I think it would suit Serah perfectly for her big day!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Just because I've proposed doesn't mean the wedding is soon!" Snow tried to backpedal, sensing his wedding was about to be planned out for him. "Why on earth are you getting so excited about this, anyway?"

Vanille's expression dipped suddenly, but as quickly as her smile had gone it was back again. She gave a playful shrug and laugh, but Fang had caught it and decided to fill the man in.

"We're L'Cie. We have everything against us. Who knows if this is the last time we go to sleep with human bodies? If we find a way to save ourselves and your Cocoon…who says that will change anything anyway? And if we don't, we'll be dead. Weddings are happy things. They're good distractions. Which is why I think you did it in the first place; to distract Serah from her fate. We want to talk about your wedding, because we have a whole night ahead of us before we can go on and the alternative is talking about terrifying things that all want to kill us."

Snow was silent, the rest of the group all staring at their hands or the fire as Fang's words sunk in. They were living on borrowed time and nobody wanted to talk about that.

"So…Snow? What kinds of flowers are you guys going to have?" Fang's gaze met Snow's over the roaring flames, her eyes almost desperately pleading for the lighter topic of conversation. She couldn't go another night with nightmares of becoming Ragnarok; of her body burning in pain as she transformed and destroyed everything in sight.

"Roses. Red ones…Serah always loved them."


End file.
